JOKER — Comedy Is Destruction
SPOILERS: This is an in-depth article on the movie ‘Joker’ and is meant to be read after viewing. It openly discusses and analyzes many plot points of the movie and is full of spoilers.
“I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize, it’s a fucking comedy.” — Arthur Fleck
Joker is a movie that unpacks the dark side of comedy and shows us that, yes, comedy is, and always has been, all ABOUT pain and suffering.
After all, humor is only funny if you’re on the right side of the joke. Watching someone slip on a banana peel is funny. Slipping on one is not. It’s humiliating, painful, and disorienting and peoples’ laughter just makes it worse. The object of ridicule rarely sees the humor in a joke. And that is, on some level, what the Joker movie is. Feeling the “joke” from the inside out. Following an unwilling punchline from one sadistic comedy piece to another until he finally learns how to make others the punchline in the same painful way he has been unwillingly made one.
The Inverted Comedy
In the opening sequence of Joker, a clown is dancing to an old-timey piano in a crowded street. Suddenly he has his sign stolen by a bunch of children. The clown, in full makeup and baggy costume, takes chase, running awkwardly at top speed through traffic as best as he can in his wig and giant floppy shoes. Around the corner, he loses his balance and skids trying to make the turn without falling over. One of the children smacks him with his own sign which shatters sending the clown flying up into the air and onto his back.
This scene, as described, has the clear structure of a classic slapstick comedy, and yet all it makes us feel in “Joker” is depression, anxiety, and sympathy. It’s all backwards.
Why?
The effect of a clown’s white facepaint and costume is to distance us from them emotionally. The fool is the medieval version of a cartoon. They are not exactly human. We are clearly not meant to have empathy for them in the same way we would a “real” person. We are allowed to laugh at them, free from guilt.
The reason the clown chase above is not funny, is because in the first scene in the movie, just before the chase, we see Arthur Fleck before he applies his clown persona. We see him as a real person wracked with emotions; sadness, determination, and anger. He cries in frustration trying to apply his makeup. We see a real, fragile person, not a clown.
Because we so strongly identify with Arthur in the first scene, the distancing symbols of the clown have no effect on us. We have already been introduced to, and identify with, the troubled man beneath them. The movie is from the perspective of Arthur and remains that way, forcing us into empathy instead of humor. After the laughing children run away, the viewer stays on the dirty ground with Arthur, struggling to breath through his pain. The laughter of the children seems cruel and cold. The wig and makeup does nothing to hide his real pain and humiliation.
Our emotional connection in the movie, is now tied to the object of ridicule. We are never allowed to laugh at Arthur Fleck, and if we are dared to laugh at him, it courts our own sadistic pleasure in his pain.
Comedy Is Funny AND Destructive
In every joke, there is something that is being broken. Some treasured idea that is being trivialized. Someone is being hurt or degraded for our amusement. Because of this, comedy has a connection with a certain brand of sadism that Arthur Fleck knows all too well. Like a pack of 6th graders “taking down” the fat kid, it’s only funny on one side, but it is annihilating on the other. Like the dehumanizing racial jokes that eventually provoke and condone acts of violence. Like the sexual tropes that desensitize us to the suffering of others. Comedy is funny AND damaging. When it attacks what oppresses us (our worries, our fears, or those in power) it’s almost heroic. When it makes fun of us, our friends, or our ideals, it’s an attack.
In the Joker there is a scene of a Charlie Chaplain movie where he skates blindfolded a few inches away from a fall off a balcony over and over again and we see Arthur stop to watch and laugh. Taken literally, comedy is horrifying. No sane person would wish being a comedic hero on anyone. Back to the days of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplain often the funniest bits leave the main character a millimeter away from certain death. From medieval fools to the three stooges to Dumb and Dumber, the comic hero is often a human wrecking ball being dragged through, and destroying a world they don’t fit into. Is the Joker is much different.? He’s just, at first, unwilling.
Comedy or Tragedy?
So is every tragedy just a reversed joke? It seems that in this movie, the main difference between comedy and tragedy is that in a comedy, someone is laughing at you. When Arthur snarls the line about his life being a comedy while murdering his mother, he isn’t saying that is a better thing, but maybe much much worse.
In a tragedy, people care for those that bad things happen to. A child with cancer is a tragedy because people hope and pray that the worst will not happen. No one EVER cares about Arthur. They are often entertained or otherwise enriched by his suffering, or at the best, they are indifferent. This is no tragedy. There is simply not a single moment of genuine caring for this man in the whole movie no matter how terrible things get for him. No matter how desperate his need. People either ignore him, add to his suffering, or take great pleasure in it.
The audience cares however, and so his story to us is a tragedy, but not to him. He knows he is the butt of joke after joke and he knows it because everyone is laughing at him. They literally laugh as they kick him in the alley, as they beat him in the subway, as he watches himself mocked on TV. Even his own mother is in on the joke. Only in his imagination is anyone every kind to him.
Much like his clown face-paint and costume, Arthur’s poverty, social position, economic situation, and mental illness also act to marginalize him and make him seem less than human to a certain kind of person. They distance him and make him easier to laugh at; harder to sympathize with. People like Thomas Wayne and the men that attacked him on the subway are able to approach him without the proper level of empathy because of this. But unlike the clown makeup, this is a distancing effect he can not remove since it does not lie with him, but lives in the minds of his attackers.
Comedy Is Everywhere
The movie, more than most, is a movie that is completely linked to Arthur’s own perspective of the world. Arthur often dances along to music that only exists as the soundtrack of the movie we are listening to. The movie, many times, shows us people and interactions that only exist in his head. There is nothing we see or hear that is not biased. If we see it in the movie, it is because Arthur believes it.
Because of this many of the perspectives in the movie are intentionally inverted from our past encounters with the DC universe. The great Thomas Wayne is sociopathic manipulator and a stuck-up bully. Bruce Wayne (lil’ Batman) is an angelic little boy to be befriended and entertained. The Joker himself is a victim and an anti-hero waging war on an unjust world of douche bags. And everyone is involved in the great comedy of making everyone else miserable for a laugh.
Like the comedic/tragic opening of the movie, there are countless references to comedy large and small, obvious, and subtle throughout the whole movie. In each one he is the comic hero. Which is to say he is the brunt of the joke. Which is to say he feels this way about himself.
A few examples from the movie:
In the last scene of the movie Arthur dances (to the soundtrack), and then erupts into a comic chase straight out of a cartoon or silent movie, complete with a graceful “fin” card at the end.
He talks tough to two cops investigating the murder he committed and after pulling off a pretty macho scene, slams himself into a sliding glass door that does not open trying to leave. He can not make the sensor open the door. The cops have to tell him he’s trying to enter through the exit.
He dances in his clown costume for a hospital room full of sick children and while singing “If you’re happy and you know it stomp your feet.” a fully loaded gun falls out of his clown pants in plain view of the whole room.
His uncontrollable laughter acts as a laugh track that, instead of laughter, literally provokes people to physical attacks. Further proof that comedy is only funny if you’re not the one being laughed at.
The movie is full of jokes, gags, and humor. Comedy and the structure of comedy are everywhere. Murders are dealt out as literal punchlines to jokes. Chase scenes are modeled after classic silent movies and cartoons. Diatribes sparking revolution are delivered in the comedic setting of a classic late night talk show. Stand up routines are used to push his sanity over the edge.
It’s all about what side of the humor you find yourself on.
The Joker
Arthur has no reason find anything funny BUT HE WANTS TO.
Maybe one of the most telling scenes about Arthur’s personality could be at the end of the first clown chase scene. While laying on the ground, beaten, struggling even to breath, in the most heroic clown-like move ever, he manages to press the hidden button on his fake flower to make it squirt water. The water bleeds sadly into the street and no one to see it. Why!? We can only guess, but it seems to say, that in the end, Arthur is a performer, and he wants to make the joke work. Or maybe he sees the grim humor of his situation? Could this still be funny somehow?
But one day, on the subway, almost instinctively, and by accident, Arthur falls out of his role as punchline and into the other side of the joke. It’s possible to imagine that he never even understood that side ever existed. Like an epiphany, he finally realizes what’s so funny.
Hurting him was funny to them, but hurting them is also funny to him. There is another side to this world of hurt, and that is comedy. It’s always been comedy. He finds that maybe he has something in common with his oppressors after all. Because he likes it too.
The structure of a joke, produces humor, but it also can produce pain simultaneously. When kids ridicule another child, it’s an attack using humor. Humor, like art, is subjective. It could be argued that nothing is objectively funny. Contrary to popular belief, humor doesn’t really bring us together, but reinforces our own beliefs and is seen as attacking if it contradicts our beliefs.
Arthur’s view of comedy as the perpetual object of ridicule is dark at best. Sadistic at worst. For instance, his own narcissistic and psychotic mother allowed him to be tied to a radiator as a child and abused over and over again. Depressed, brain-damaged, and traumatized, she called him “Happy” his whole life and told him his job was to spread joy laughter. Like calling the fat guy “Slim”. When he tries to spread laughter, his mother tells him he can’t, because he’s not funny! She’s not deluded he is a happy, funny person. She’s in on the joke!
If he could just be allowed to see his life as a tragedy we would all be safe from Joker. If someone could just put their arms around him and say “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. It made me cry. Who could do that to you? Everything that’s happened to you is a nightmare! Don’t be happy. Cry! Rage! Scream! I agree!” But no one does. If he could just see concern and empathy reflected in someone else, he could feel it for himself. All he gets is laughter, and that is ultimately what he learns to feel about himself and about us. Life is a joke.
If you are the butt of the joke it’s funny when the rest of the world gets hit in the face. When the rest of the world gets its pants pulled down and spanked or gets put in traction. He’s not just attacking you, he’s joking with you, the way he was joked with. And that is not good. Like a stand up comic who can mercilessly make fun of themselves and then go into the audience and rip apart everyone else. It’s all comedy to him now.
A narcissistic psychotic masochist off their meds is not someone you want to be spreading joy.
This Joker is scary because he wants to make you the punchline. He wants to make you the comedic hero. He wants to see you fall off the ledge into the cactus. He wants to see you locked into the lion’s cage. It’s a humor war where each side is sometimes the punchline, and sometimes the puncher. He’s learned that what you think is funny, is actually horrible. What he thinks is funny is horrible to you. You are not on the same team.
Pain and pleasure are both sides of the same comic joke. Arthur has learned to laugh at both sides.
NOTE: As the movie is still in theaters at the time of writing we apologize if we are not 100% accurate in the details. We relied on repeated viewings, interviews, and leaked scripts for quotes and scene descriptions. Please let us know if you find anything amiss!
